American Realist Painter, 1844-1916. Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 ?C June 25, 1916) was a realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history. For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some forty years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; individually, they are incisive depictions of thinking persons. As well, Eakins produced a number of large paintings which brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject which most inspired him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion. In the process he could model the forms of the body in full sunlight, and create images of deep space utilizing his studies in perspective. No less important in Eakins' life was his work as a teacher. As an instructor he was a highly influential presence in American art. The difficulties which beset him as an artist seeking to paint the portrait and figure realistically were paralleled and even amplified in his career as an educator, where behavioral and sexual scandals truncated his success and damaged his reputation. Eakins also took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator. Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little by way of official recognition during his lifetime. Since his death, he has been celebrated by American art historians as "the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century American art".  Related Paintings of Thomas Eakins :. | Arcadia | Home Scene | Biglen Brothers Racing | Salutat | Fifty years ago |
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Henry John Yeend King
an important Victorian genre and landscape artist . English,1855-1924
Johan Vilhelm Gertner
(10 March 1818 - 28 March 1871) was a Danish painter, best known for his portraiture. One of the last students of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, who was known as the father of the Golden Age of Danish Painting, Gertner belonged to the tail end of the Golden Age, a period during which Danish art moved towards a more realistic style, relying on inspiration both from French Realism and emerging photographic techniques. Gertner was born on 10 March 1818 to a craftsman at the Holmen naval base. He attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1831 to 1837 where he was one of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, known as the farther of Goldn Age of Danish Painting. Eckersberg taught him a naturalistic approach to painting, but Gertner went much further with inspiration from French art and the emerging techniques of photography. His virtuosity in producing almost photographically precise portraits impressed many; in particular, his ability to reproduce textures and materials e crisp silk dresses, lustrous medals and jewellery, dark mahogany furniture, silky wallpapers, and soft carpets e won him much acclaim. Others, such as the influential art historian and critic Niels Lauritz Høyen, who opposed any foreign influence on Danish painting, disapproved of his style, preferring more sincere and sensitive portrayals. He was a professor at the Academy from 1858.
Plamondon, Antoine Sebastien
1841 Oil on canvas National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.